Rafe Marquez, 54, retired wildland fire crew supervisor, had avoided every Sunridge Estates community event for 18 months straight. The only reason he was manning the grease-slicked grill at the summer block party was because his 16-year-old next-door neighbor had begged, saying the rest of the volunteer grill crew bailed to go to a minor league baseball game an hour away. Rafe’s knuckles were crisscrossed with old burn scars, his left wrist bearing a thick white gash from a 2019 blaze outside Flagstaff that put him in the hospital for three weeks, and he flipped burgers with the same steady, no-nonsense motion he’d used to swing a Pulaski on fire lines for 28 years. His personality flaw, as his late wife had teased him constantly for, was holding petty grudges for years longer than they deserved, and his grudge against the Sunridge HOA was particularly sharp: the old board had fined him three separate times last year for parking his dented 1987 Ford F-150 on the street overnight, even after he explained he was working late at the local volunteer fire station and didn’t have space in his garage for the truck and his collection of vintage fire suppression gear.
He was halfway through his second cold beer, the can sweating through the paper koozie emblazoned with the Arizona Wildfire Service logo, when he spotted her walking over. Clara Bennett, 47, the new HOA president who’d moved to the neighborhood from Portland six months prior, the woman he’d called a stuck-up, rule-obsessed pain in the ass to his poker buddies at least a dozen times. She was wearing cutoff denim shorts frayed at the hem, a white linen button down tied loose at her waist, scuffed brown leather sandals on her bare, sun-kissed feet, and she was carrying a paper plate stacked high with homemade churro bites dusted with cinnamon sugar. He tensed up, ready to snap if she brought up the truck fines, but she leaned in close when she greeted him, close enough that he could smell coconut sunscreen and warm cinnamon on her breath, the faint, sweet scent of jasmine perfume clinging to her hair.
“Word on the street is you’re the only person within five miles who knows how to cook a burger without turning it into a charcoal briquette,” she said, grinning, and her arm brushed his when she reached for a stack of napkins sitting next to his grill tongs. The contact was light, accidental, but Rafe’s skin prickled all the way up to his shoulder. She sat on the edge of the dented blue cooler next to the grill, her knee knocking his when she shifted to get comfortable, and she didn’t move away when he didn’t shift either. She told him she’d thrown out the last two of his HOA fine notices the week she took over the board, said the old crew was being petty for targeting a guy who spent half his free time volunteering to put out wildfires that threatened the whole county, and Rafe stared at her for a full three seconds, completely thrown, before he laughed, a rough, rusty sound he didn’t use much these days.
They talked for 20 minutes, the line at the grill piling up, neither of them noticing. She held his eye contact every time he spoke, never glancing away to look at someone else passing by, and she laughed so hard at his joke about the HOA’s obsession with perfectly green lawns in the middle of a record drought that she snort-laughed, clapping a hand over her mouth, her knee pressing harder against his denim clad thigh for a split second. A group of kids ran past chasing a golden retriever, one of them slamming into her shoulder, and she grabbed his forearm to steady herself, her palm warm and soft against the rough, scarred skin of his arm. She didn’t let go right away, her fingers curling just a little around his muscle, and she said she’d been trying to talk to him for weeks, but he kept ducking into his garage or driving off in his truck every time she walked down his street.
She said she’d picked up a vintage 1978 McCulloch chainsaw at a garage sale the weekend before, couldn’t get it to turn over, had been told he was the only guy in the neighborhood who knew how to fix old small engine gear. She said she had cold horchata in her fridge, homemade, her abuela’s recipe, if he wanted to come over after he was done with the grill. Rafe hesitated, all the snarky comments he’d made about her running through his head, the way he’d written her off entirely without ever saying two words to her, the sharp, warm twist of desire low in his gut he hadn’t felt since his wife died. He nodded, reaching over to pluck a churro bite off the plate she was holding, the sugar sticking to his fingertips, and said he’d swing by around 8, once the grill was shut down and all the kids had gone home.
She grinned, squeezing his forearm once before she let go, picking up her plate and walking back toward the picnic tables. Rafe watched her go, the sun gilding the ends of her brown hair, the way her hips swayed a little when she walked, and he flipped the next burger so hard it slipped off the tongs, landed in the patch of crabgrass next to the grill. His 16-year-old neighbor yelled from the other side of the picnic area, asking him what the hell he was doing, and Rafe just laughed, wiping his sticky, sugar dusted fingers on the leg of his jeans, already thinking about the rough, oiled grain of the chainsaw handle and the cold, sweet taste of horchata on his tongue later that night.
